CIA Director John Brennan has apologized after his staff
snooped on computersused by the US Senate during a probe into spies' use of torture. Brennan was speaking at a closed meeting with senators on Thursday.
... in March this year, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) – normally one of the intelligence community's biggest cheerleaders – took to the Senate floor to
complain that the CIA had infiltrated RDINet computers that were supposed to be off-limits to the g-men.
Some of the 6.2 million documents stored on the system related to an internal investigation by the CIA, and Feinstein described them as showing "significant CIA wrongdoing." But then those documents mysteriously started disappearing from Senate staffers' view.
The CIA offered a variety of scapegoats for the missing files, including claiming that IT contractors must have lost them and that the White House had asked for them to be removed. Stories were leaked to the press claiming congressional staffers themselves had been meddling with the system.
But Feinstein's allegations triggered a misconduct probe led by CIA Inspector General David Buckley. His report found that spy staff had created false accounts to access the parts of the network, and then monitored the Senate staffers on the computers and read their emails.
"The investigation confirmed what I said on the Senate floor in March - CIA personnel inappropriately searched Senate Intelligence Committee computers in violation of an agreement we had reached, and I believe in violation of the constitutional separation of powers," Feinstein said...
